專四晨讀美文：Liberating the Modern Woman

Liberating the Modern Woman?
Many of the home electric goods
which are advertised as liberating the modern woman
tend to have the opposite effect,
because they simply change the nature of work
instead of eliminating it.
Machines have a certain novelty value, like toys for adults.
It is certainly less tiring to put clothes in a washing machine,
but the time saved does not really amount to much:
the machine has to be watched,
the clothes have to be carefully sorted out first,
stains removed by hand,
buttons pushed and water changed,
clothes taken out, aired and ironed.
It would be more liberating to pack it all off to a laundry
and not necessarily more expensive,
since no capital investment is required.
Similarly, if you really want to save time
you do not make cakes with an electric mixer,
you buy one in a shop.
If one compares the image of the woman
in the women's magazine
with the goods advertised by those periodicals,
one realizes how useful a projected image can be commercially.
A careful balance has to be struck:
if you show a labour-saving device,
follow it up with a complicated recipe on the next page;
on no account hint at the notion
that a woman could get herself a job,
but instead foster her sense of her own usefulness,
emphasizing the creative aspect of her function as a housewife.
So we get cake mixes
where the cook simply adds an egg herself,
to produce "that lovely home-baked flavour the family love",
and knitting patterns that can be made by hand,
or worse still, on knitting machines,
which became tremendously fashionable
when they were first introduced.
Automatic cookers are advertised
by pictures of pretty young mothers
taking their children to the park,
not by professional women
presetting the dinner before leaving home for work.